In school
Easy access to information leads to good decisions Christopher King explains how his school puts information directly into the hands of those who need it to provide the support every child needs to succeed Most schools use information such as attendance marks, target grades and assessment scores to monitor pupils’ achievement and help ensure they make good progress in their learning. But making everyday decisions about the attainment, behaviour and welfare of your pupils can be a challenge when you can’t easily get hold of the information you need to make them. There is no shortage of information stored within the walls of Leicester Grammar School, but some of our records have historically been kept in paper files, while others were held electronically. This made it unnecessarily difficult for staff to find the information they needed to support each child’s learning. In a thriving school of 1,240 pupils aged between 11 and 18, our teachers were spending a lot of time searching for data. We wanted to change this. Classrooms at Leicester Grammar contain a mix of children keen to learn, each with their own unique blend of strengths,
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abilities and qualities, and our teachers are highly skilled at making decisions about what support each individual requires to achieve their full potential. Where a pupil has a special educational need, for instance, it is important for subject teachers not only to be aware of this, but also to know what level of support the pupil needs in the classroom from the moment they meet the child. Likewise, when a teacher wants to find out how a pupil performed in last year’s English assessment, or respond quickly to a query from a parent about their child’s history project, the information needs to be at their fingertips, not in a cupboard or computer file through which they have to spend time searching. Information is the heart of good decision-making. That’s why we have pulled the pupil and school data we hold into one place in our management information system (ours is from SIMS Independent), making it quicker and easier for staff
Autumn 2017
CCR Vol54 no3 Autumn 2017.indd 16
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